social media is making us anti social essay

• SUGGESTED TOPICS
• The Magazine
• Newsletters
• Managing Yourself
• Managing Teams
• Work-life Balance
• The Big Idea
• Data & Visuals
• Reading Lists
• Case Selections
• HBR Learning
• Topic Feeds
• Account Settings
• Email Preferences

The Era of Antisocial Social Media

• Sara Wilson

Young people’s behaviors are changing. How will businesses adapt?

When you look at who is — and more importantly, who is not — driving the growth and popularity of social platforms, a key demographic appears to be somewhat in retreat: young people. They’re craving privacy, safety, and a respite from the throngs of people on social platforms (throngs that now usually include their parents), and gravitating toward more intimate destinations. The author has dubbed these “digital campfires.” She outlines three kinds of campfires, including the characteristics of each, as well as how brands are successfully reaching these audiences.

Social platforms are still reporting robust growth — yes, even Facebook — despite a growing chorus of opposition. Social conversation continues to shape everything from culture to the media cycle to our most intimate relationships . And we now spend more time than ever on our phones , with endless scrolling through our social feeds being a chief reason why.

• Sara Wilson   helps brands, publishers and high-profile individuals find, engage and grow devoted audiences across digital channels. As the founder of SW Projects , she has advised clients including Nike, Bumble, the New York Times, National Geographic, Sony Pictures Television, Bustle, Overheard, and others. Prior to SW Projects, Sara oversaw lifestyle partnerships at Facebook & Instagram. Sara is also the creator of The Digital Campfire Download, where she interviews the entrepreneurs behind the fastest-growing online communities today. You can follow her on Twitter @ wilsonspeaks  or on LinkedIn @ saraewilson .

Partner Center

October 1, 2016

Social Technologies Are Making Us Less Social

For the first time in the history of our species, we are never alone and never bored. Have we lost something fundamental about being human?

By Mark Fischetti

Martin O'Neill

Chances are that you have a smartphone, Twitter and Instagram accounts, and a Facebook page and that you have found yourself ignoring a friend or family member who is in the same room as you because you are totally engrossed in your social technology. That technology means never having to feel alone or bored. Yet ironically, it can make us less attentive to the people closest to us and even make it hard for us to simply be with ourselves. Many of us are afraid to make this admission. “We're still in a romance with these technologies,” says Sherry Turkle of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “We're like young lovers who are afraid that talking about it will spoil it.” Turkle has interviewed, at length, hundreds of individuals of all ages about their interactions with smartphones, tablets, social media, avatars and robots. Unlike previous disruptive innovations such as the printing press or television, the latest “always on, always on you” technology, she says, threatens to undermine some basic human strengths that we need to thrive. In the conversation that follows, which has been edited for space, Turkle explains her concerns, as well as her cautious optimism that the youngest among us could actually resolve the challenges.

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN:

What concerns you most about our constant interaction with our social technologies? TURKLE: One primary change I see is that people have a tremendous lack of tolerance for being alone. I do some of my fieldwork at stop signs, at checkout lines at supermarkets. Give people even a second, and they're doing something with their phone. Every bit of research says people's capacity to be alone is disappearing. What can happen is that you lose that moment to have a daydream or to cast an eye inward. Instead you look to the outside.

On supporting science journalism

If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing . By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.

Is that an issue for individuals of all ages? Yes, but children especially need solitude. Solitude is the precondition for having a conversation with yourself. This capacity to be with yourself and discover yourself is the bedrock of development. But now, from the youngest age—even two, or three, or four—children are given technology that removes solitude by giving them something externally distracting. That makes it harder, ironically, to form true relationships.

Maybe people just don't want to be bored. People talk about never needing to have a lull. As soon as it occurs, they look at the phone; they get anxious. They haven't learned to have conversations or relationships, which involve lulls.

Are we valuing relationships less, then? People start to view other people in part as objects. Imagine two people on a date. “Hey, I have an idea. Instead of our just looking at each other face-to-face, why don't we each wear Google Glass, so if things get a little dull, I can just catch up on my e-mail? And you won't know.” This disrupts the family, too. When Boring Auntie starts to talk at the family dinner table, her little niece pulls out her phone and goes on Facebook. All of a sudden her world is populated with snowball fights and ballerinas. And dinner is destroyed. Dinner used to be the utopian ideal of the American family having a canonical three-generation gathering.

What about people who take their phones to bed? They're asleep, so why would they feel alone? I have interviewed enough middle school and high school kids: “So tell me, do you answer your texts in the middle of the night?” “Oh, yeah.” I call it “I share, therefore I am,” as a style of being.

If you're sharing in the middle of the night and responsive to people in the middle of the night, you're in a different zone. And all these people feel responsible to respond. The expectation is constant access. Everyone is ready to call in the advice and the consent of their peers. I did a case study of a young woman who has 2,000 followers on Instagram. She'll ask about a problem at 9:00 at night, and at 2:00 in the morning she's getting responses, and she's awake to get those responses. This is 2:00 in the morning for a lot of kids.

Where does this lead for someone who lives that way? If you don't call a halt to it, I think you don't fully develop a sense of an autonomous self. You're not able to be in personal relationships, business relationships, because you don't feel fully competent to handle major things on your own. You run into trouble if you're putting everything up, ultimately, for a vote.

You're crowdsourcing your life. You're crowdsourcing major decisions. I hope it's likely, however, that a person reaches a point where they're on a job—they're not twentysomething, they're thirtysomething—and this starts to become less comfortable, and they develop emotional skills that they really haven't worked on.

What about our interactions with automated personalities and robots? When we started looking at this in the 1970s, people took the position that even if simulated thinking might be thinking, simulated feeling was not feeling. Simulated love was never love. But that's gone away. People tell me that if Siri [the iPhone voice] could fool them a little better, they'd be happy to talk to Siri.

Isn't that like the movie Her? Absolutely. The current position seems to be that if there's a robot that could fool me into thinking that it understands me, I'm good to have it as a companion. This is a significant evolution in what we ask for in our interactions, even on intimate matters. I see it in kids. I see it in grown-ups. The new robots are designed to make you feel as though you're understood. Yet nobody is pretending that any of them understands anything.

What line does that cross—that there's no empathy? There's no authentic exchange. You're saying empathy is not important to the feeling of being understood. And yet I interviewed a woman who said to me that she's okay with a robot boyfriend. She wants one of these sophisticated Japanese robots. I looked at her and said, “You know that it doesn't understand you.” She said, “Look, I just want civility in the house. I just want something that will make me feel not alone.”

People are also good with a robot that could stand in as a companion for an older person. But I take a moral position here because older people deserve to tell the story of their life to someone who understands what a life is. They've lost spouses; they've lost children. We're suggesting they tell the story of their life to something that has no idea what a life is or what a loss is.

It's crucial to understand that this changing interaction is not just a story about technology. It's a story about how we are evolving when we're faced with something passive. I hope we're going to look closer at people's willingness to project humanity onto a robot and to accept a facade of empathy as the real thing because I think that such interactions are a dead end. We want more from technology and less from each other? Really?

Do avatars and virtual reality present the same issues? In these cases, we are moving from life to the mix of your real life and your virtual life. One young man put it very succinctly: “Real life is just one window, and it's not necessarily my best one.” People forgot about virtual reality for a while, but the acquisition of Oculus by Facebook raised it again—Mark Zuckerberg's fantasy that you will meet up with your friends in a virtual world where everybody looks like Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, you live in a beautiful home, and you present only what you want to present. We're evolving toward thinking of that as a utopian image.

But skeptics say your avatar is not different from the real you. Well, we do perform all the time. I'm trying to do my best Sherry Turkle right now. But it's a little different from me hanging out in my pajamas. What's different with an avatar or on Facebook is that you get to edit. A woman posts a photo of herself and then works on the color and background and lighting. Why? Because she wants it a certain way. We've never before been able to have it the way we wanted it. And now we can. People love that.

I asked an 18-year-old man, “What's wrong with conversation?” He said, “It takes place in real time. You can't control what you're going to say.” It was profound. That's also why a lot of people like to do their dealings on e-mail—it's not just the time shifting; it's that you basically can get it right.

One reason for the rise of humans is that functioning in groups gives each member a better chance to succeed. Will the move toward living online undermine those benefits? Oh, this is the question before us. Are we undermining, or are we enhancing our competitive advantage? A lot of my colleagues would say we're enhancing it. The Internet is giving us new ways of getting together, forming alliances. But I think we are at a point of inflection. While we were infatuated with the virtual, we dropped the ball on where we actually live. We need to balance how compelling the virtual is with the realities that we live in our bodies and on this planet. It is so easy for us to look the other way. Are we going to get out there and make our real communities what they should be?

Your critics say there's nothing to worry about because this “new technology” situation is not really new. We went through this with television—you know, TV is there to watch your kids so you don't have to. First of all, television can be a group exercise. I grew up in a family that sat around a TV and watched it together, fought about what was on the TV together, commented on it together. But when everybody watches their own show in their own room, so to speak, that stops. Technology that is always on and always on you—that is a quantum leap. I agree that there have been quantum leaps before: the book. The difference with “always on,” however, is that I really don't have a choice.

You mean, you could turn off the TV and still function. I cannot live my professional life or my personal life without my phone or my e-mail. My students can't even obtain their syllabus without it. We don't have an opt-out option from a world with this technology. The question is, How are we going to live a more meaningful life with something that is always on and always on you? And wait until it's in your ear, in your jacket, in your glasses.

So how do we resolve that? It's going to develop as some sort of common practice. I think companies will get involved, realizing that it actually isn't good for people to be constantly connected. Our etiquette will get involved; today if I get a message and don't get back to people in 24 hours, they're worried about me, or they're mad that I haven't replied. Why? I think we will change our expectation of having constant access.

Any suggestions for how we can get started? One argument I make is that there should be sacred spaces: the family dinner table, the car. Make these the places for conversation because conversation is the antidote to a lot of the issues I'm describing. If you're talking to your kids, if you're talking to your family, if you're talking to a community, these negative effects don't arise as much.

And we should be talking more about the technologies? My message is not antitechnology. It's pro conversation and pro the human spirit. It's really about calling into questions our dominant culture of more, better, faster. We need to assert what we need for our own thinking, for our own development, and for our relationships with our children, with our communities, with our intimate partners. As for the robots, I'm hoping that people will realize that what we're really disappointed in is ourselves. It's so upsetting to me. We're basically saying that we're not offering one another the conversation and the companionship. That, really, is the justification for talking to a robot that you know doesn't understand a word you're saying. We are letting each other down. It's not about the robots. It's about us.

So who is going to stop this train we are on? The most optimistic thing I see is the young people who have grown up with this technology but aren't smitten by it, who are willing to say, “Hold on a second.” They see the ways in which it's undermined life at school and life with their parents. This is where I'm guardedly hopeful.

I have so many examples of children who will be talking with their parents; something will come up, and the parent will go online to search, and the kid will say, “Daddy, stop Googling. I just want to talk to you.” When I go to the city park, I see kids go to the top of the jungle gym and call out, “Mommy, Mommy!” and they're being ignored. They object to being ignored when they're five, eight or nine. But when I interview these kids when they're 13, 14 or 15, they become reflective. They say, “I'm not going to bring up my children the way I'm being brought up.” They're going to have rules, like no phones at dinner.

I also see evidence that dealing with some of this technology is feeling to them like work—the whole notion that you have to constantly keep up your Facebook profile. So I think there's every possibility that the children will lead us. They see the costs. They think, “I don't have to give up this technology, but maybe I could be a little smarter about it.”

Mark Fischetti has been a senior editor at Scientific American for 17 years and has covered sustainability issues, including climate, weather, environment, energy, food, water, biodiversity, population, and more. He assigns and edits feature articles, commentaries and news by journalists and scientists and also writes in those formats. He edits History, the magazine's department looking at science advances throughout time. He was founding managing editor of two spinoff magazines: Scientific American Mind and Scientific American Earth 3.0 . His 2001 freelance article for the magazine, " Drowning New Orleans ," predicted the widespread disaster that a storm like Hurricane Katrina would impose on the city. His video What Happens to Your Body after You Die? , has more than 12 million views on YouTube. Fischetti has written freelance articles for the New York Times, Sports Illustrated, Smithsonian, Technology Review, Fast Company, and many others. He co-authored the book Weaving the Web with Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, which tells the real story of how the Web was created. He also co-authored The New Killer Diseases with microbiologist Elinor Levy. Fischetti is a former managing editor of IEEE Spectrum Magazine and of Family Business Magazine . He has a physics degree and has twice served as the Attaway Fellow in Civic Culture at Centenary College of Louisiana, which awarded him an honorary doctorate. In 2021 he received the American Geophysical Union's Robert C. Cowen Award for Sustained Achievement in Science Journalism, which celebrates a career of outstanding reporting on the Earth and space sciences. He has appeared on NBC's Meet the Press, CNN, the History Channel, NPR News and many news radio stations. Follow Fischetti on X (formerly Twitter) @markfischetti

Is Social Media Making Us Less Social?

Written by Steve Rose

Identity, purpose, and belonging, 15 comments(s).

On the go? Listen to the audio version of the article here:

In an age where we are becoming more connected through social media every day, it sometimes feels like we are also becoming less social.

Why go through all of the inconvenience of meeting up in person when you can simply catch up online?

Within the last decade, technology has profoundly shifted the nature of human communication.

Some say we are “hyper-social,” always connected and communicating with multiple people at the same time.  Others would say we have become “anti-social,” glued to our devices, and lacking interpersonal skills.  So which is it?

Is social media making us less social?

Social Media is making us less social when used to compare oneself to others, contributing to higher levels of loneliness and lower levels of well-being among frequent users. It can be social when used to connect with others.

Let’s take a look at the research.

Also, if you or someone you know is struggling with mental health issues, you can check out my  resource page  for suggestions on how to find help.

Social Media Contributes to Social Isolation

The first study looking at this phenomenon was published in 1998, around the time when many people were starting to use the internet.

The researchers followed 169 people during the first two years of their internet use to determine if this new technology made them more social or less social, finding:

“…greater use of the Internet was associated with declines in participants’ communication with family members in the household, declines in the size of their social circle, and increases in their depression and loneliness.”

This was seen as quite the paradox, given that the individuals were using the internet extensively as a communication technology.

A 2004 study comparing internet use to face-to-face interaction found a similar conclusion, stating:

…the Internet can decrease social well-being, even though it is often used as a communication tool.

Has anything changed since then?

Ten years later, a 2014 study  on college students suffering from internet addiction found:

Results show that excessive and unhealthy Internet use would increase feelings of loneliness over time…[.] This study also found that online social contacts with friends and family were not an effective alternative for offline social interactions in reducing feelings of loneliness.

In her recent book,  iGen , Jean Twenge writes about the generation born after 1994, finding high rates of mental health issues and isolation:

“A stunning 31% more 8th and 10th graders felt lonely in 2015 than in 2011, along with 22% more 12th graders”…[.] All in all, iGen’ers are increasingly disconnected from human relationships.

She argues the increasing level of screen-time and decreasing degree of in-person interaction leaves igen lacking social skills:

“In the next decade we may see more young people who know just the right emoji for a situation—but not the right facial expression.”

A 2016 study comments on this generational phenomenon, stating:

It is surprising then that, in spite of this enhanced interconnectivity, young adults may be lonelier than other age groups, and that the current generation may be the loneliest ever.

The correlation between internet use and isolation is fairly established in the literature. But let’s not paint the whole internet with the same brush.

A 2014 study  highlights the psychological costs and benefits derived from social media use, stating:

…online tools create a paradox for social connectedness. On one hand, they elevate the ease in which individuals may form and create online groups and communities, but on the other, they can create a source of alienation and ostracism.

It turns out the answer may be a bit more complicated.

Let’s take a look at the specific factors that make the difference.

Social Media Can Be Social (If used to connect)

A 2016 study with the apt subtitle, “Why an Instagram picture may be worth more than a thousand Twitter words,” finds that image-based social media platforms like Instagram and Snapchat may be able to decrease loneliness because of the higher levels of intimacy they provide.

Another 2016 study , specifically looking at Instagram use, found that it isn’t the platform that matters. It is the way the platform is used that matters.

The researchers studied Instagram use among 208 undergraduate students, finding there was one thing that made all the difference: “the social comparison orientation.”

What is social comparison orientation?

It’s when you compare yourself to others on social media. For example, you may find yourself passively scanning through an endless feed of finely curated photos, wishing you had a different body, a different job, a different  life !

It’s the sense that everyone has it better than you, and that you’re missing out on all of the best events, vacations, and products.

Students who rated high on social comparison orientation were more likely to widely broadcast their posts in an attempt to gain status. Students who rated low were more likely to use the platform to connect with others meaningfully.

A 2008 study on internet use among older adults supports this distinction, finding:

…greater use of the Internet as a communication tool was associated with a lower level of social loneliness. In contrast, greater use of the Internet to find new people was associated with a higher level of emotional loneliness.

Using the internet as a communication tool can decrease loneliness.

Experimental evidence in a 2004 study , highlights this by measuring a person’s level of loneliness throughout multiple intervals as they engage in an online chat. They concluded:

Internet use was found to decrease loneliness and depression significantly, while perceived social support and self-esteem increased significantly.

Although chatting online can decrease loneliness, what about using social media platforms to post status updates?

A 2012 study  conducted an experiment to determine if posting a Facebook status increases or decreases loneliness. Yes, this is an actual experiment.

The researchers told one group of participants to increase their number of status updates for one week. They didn’t give any instructions to a second control group. Results revealed:

(1) that the experimentally induced increase in status updating activity reduced loneliness, (2) that the decrease in loneliness was due to participants feeling more connected to their friends on a daily basis, and (3) that the effect of posting on loneliness was independent of direct social feedback (i.e., responses) by friends.  

These results may seem to contradict the previous finding that social media broadcasting is correlated with increased loneliness, but there is a crucial difference: the social comparison orientation.

In this experiment, the researchers did not differentiate between users who had high or low levels of social comparison. The users in the group being told to update their status more frequently were not told to scan their news feeds more often, nor was their social media use manipulated to alter their level of social comparison.

So what is the key lesson here?

Using social media in a way that connects us with others can make us less lonely and more social.

Unfortunately, as social media use increases, we are becoming lonelier.

This trend suggests we may not be using social media in the most social ways, comparing ourselves to others. In addition, we may be sacrificing in-person interaction for the convenience of social media interaction. Both of these factors increase the likelihood of experiencing social isolation.

If you are interested in reading more on the psychology of social media, you can check out my comprehensive post on the topic here: Why We Are Addicted To Social Media: The Psychology of Likes .

In that article, I go deep into the research on what keeps our brains hooked on social media likes and how you can use social media in a healthier way.

Fascinated by ideas? Check out my podcast:

Struggling with an addiction.

If you’re struggling with an addiction, it can be difficult to stop. Gaining short-term relief, at a long-term cost, you may start to wonder if it’s even worth it anymore. If you’re looking to make some changes, feel free to reach out. I offer individual addiction counselling to clients in the US and Canada. If you’re interested in learning more, you can send me a message here .

Other Mental Health Resources

If you are struggling with other mental health issues or are  looking for a specialist near you, use the Psychology Today therapist directory  here to find a practitioner who specializes in your area of concern.

If you require a lower-cost option, you can check out BetterHelp.com . It is one of the most flexible forms of online counseling.  Their main benefit is lower costs, high accessibility through their mobile app, and the ability to switch counselors quickly and easily, until you find the right fit.

*As an affiliate partner with Better Help, I receive a referral fee if you purchase products or services through the links provided.

As always, it is important to be critical when seeking help, since the quality of counselors are not consistent. If you are not feeling supported, it may be helpful to seek out another practitioner. I wrote an article on things to consider here .

You May Also Like…

The Power Of Authenticity In Recovery

Mar 15, 2024

As you fall deeper into addiction, you might find yourself wearing a mask so often that it starts to feel like a...

The Power of Self Acceptance

Feb 27, 2024

Imagine finding yourself in a relentless cycle, where each mistake or setback plunges you deeper into a vortex of...

How to Overcome the Inner Critic

Imagine you're walking through your day, and there's a persistent whisper that follows you. It critiques every...

15 Comments

that’s just it, people often mistake being connected on a more personal level with the total number of “Friends” they have on FB or MySpace or whatever OTHER forms of social networking, and they often neglect to realize, that face-to-face interaction is what makes these connections between people more intimate…

Exactly. Social media can supplement your social life if used to connect, but can’t be a substitute for it. Thanks for the comment! Great to connect with you again. It has been a while since I’ve posted.

Yeah but now, modern day people tend to use social media as their only FORM of connection, it’s like if you don’t exist on FB or other forms of social netowrking sites, you practctically, don’t exist at all!

With the trend toward increasing loneliness, it would for sure suggest social media is replacing in-person interaction.

one of the damning statistics on the recent programme Pllanet Children was 97% of primary school children were taken to school by an adult. They spend less time outside than those in prison. Our kids are getting fatter. They live in a bubble and social media swells that bubble and the vision of themselves becomes increasingly distorted. My grandkid loves phones because mum and dad always have their noses in their phones. The grandkid isn’t content with a kid-on phone. She wants the real one, and she’s just over a year old. We create our own hell, but our kids jump in with both feet. Why shouldn’t they? Mum and dad do it and it’s vastly entertaining. Social media swallows time. Why am I adding to it here? God knows.

Thanks for sharing this fact and your personal experience! I think you might be interested in this book on the subject of bubble wrapped children: Free-Range Kids, How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children (Without Going Nuts with Worry)

Thanks for raising this issue, Steve. I’ve tried, without success, to arrange a lunch-meet with a dear friend–just half-hour away by bus–who has fallen victim to FB’s false promise of connection. Since I’ve long escaped from FB-addiction, I no longer know how she’s doing.

Glad to see you’ve been able to gain a sense of control! I hope your friend is well and wish her all the best.

In a restaurant, I went to a couple both staring deeply and silently at their phones and said, “That’s true love.” They laughed.

lol! Nice one!

Not up on the research, but it is fascinating. Might we be getting the correlation confused? Could it be that people who are more lonely are more likely to spend time on social media in search of connection? Is this controlled in the research?

From the research I’ve seen so far, it seems that social anxiety is the confounding variable between loneliness and increased social media use. Also, Jean Twange looks at this question in her book igen and finds that the research supports the hypothesis that social media use leads to increased loneliness. A couple of experiments I cited here use a control and don’t support that hypothesis, but they are fairly limited because they only look at narrow forms of social media use like status updates or chatting with an anonymous person.

Correctly said.

Trackbacks/Pingbacks

• The Power of Social Connection | Steve Rose PhD - […] forms of addiction are especially focused on the “social” theme. My article, “Is Social Media Making us Less Social?”…

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Subscriber Only Resources

Access this article and hundreds more like it with a subscription to The New York TImes Upfront  magazine.

Article Options

Presentation View

Reading Level

Is Social Media Making Us Less Social?

Globally, about 4.7 billion people—more than half the world’s population—use social media. And experts expect the number of social media users to continue rising for years. Apps such as Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Twitter have changed the way we interact with each other. But there’s a lot of disagreement about what the overall effect is. Is all that time spent in front of computers and on our phones healthy? Two professors who study the social impact of the internet face off about whether social media is isolating us and making us interact less with the real world.

Social media allows us to be always connected, but in the process, we lose our appetite for spontaneous conversation. Online, you’re less vulnerable. You create a profile that lets you appear as you wish to be, and it’s easier to compose your thoughts and leave the thread if things become uncomfortable. After a while, you’re willing to sacrifice real conversation for mere connection.

From the beginning of social media, early users established the kinds of selves that would be on display. If you were a woman, on social media you would be thinner and more attractive than anything you could aspire to in physical reality. Your conversation could be thought out in advance. People came to love their avatars and their posts. But everything you do online subtly depletes your confidence in real life. Comparing your avatar with your physical self makes you feel worse about yourself. The net result: Social media makes you feel socially vulnerable and gives you the feeling that only screen conversations are safe.

Research indicates that social media usage makes real connections harder.

In 2009, the Stanford media psychologist Clifford Nass began to explore the relationship between online life and the emotional lives of teenage girls. The girls who considered themselves “highly connected” online were not as empathetic as those who spent less time online. The “highly connected” girls also felt less accepted by peers and didn’t have the same positive emotions from interacting with friends as those who used social media less frequently. In sum, online life was associated with a loss of empathy and a diminished capacity for self-reflection. A decade later, this study had a dramatic bookend: In Finland, a three-year study of nearly 2,000 teens linked the degree of internet use to depression, loneliness, school failure, and inability to connect with others.

On social media, we compare ourselves to the curated self-presentations of others and always come up short. Social media makes experiencing real-world emotional life very hard. And that means it’s ultimately making us less social.

—SHERRY TURKLE

Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

If being social means engaging with more people for more time, then social media is obviously making us more social, not less.

With social media, we can interact with people in globally public spaces, and that means we are social with many more people than ever before. Sometimes that will be on a discussion thread, and sometimes it will be by answering a question a stranger has posed or posting a video that might lift up the mood of someone you’ve never met.

But aren’t these relationships shallow? Maybe, but it would be more accurate to use terms from sociology: Strong ties are the rich, long-term bonds you have with family and your closest friends. Weak ties are more like the students in your classes with whom you don’t spend a lot of time. But don’t underestimate the importance of weak ties! Just imagine what it would be like if the only people you felt any connection with were the handful of the most important people in your life. Your social life would be terribly diminished.

Social media vastly increases the number of people we can know, help, and learn from.

People need weak ties, and social media has made it absurdly easy to form them. Those ties can give you a sense of being part of a loosely connected network of people with whom you have shared a moment or an interest in common. Having lots of weak ties can lead to the discovery of new interests. And they can evolve into deep friendships.

Furthermore, having lots of weak ties that include lots of different sorts of people lets us recognize that we all share a world that matters to each of us but matters differently to each of us.

Despite its many benefits, social media sometimes enables and can even encourage us to behave badly with one another. We all need to be working on changing social media to prevent this, as well as becoming more aware of the effects of our words online.

Social media has undoubtedly increased the different ways in which we can be social and the number of people we can know, help, and learn from. And that is the essence of being social.

—DAVID WEINBERGER

Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Harvard Univ.

PERCENTAGE of American adults who use at least one social media app.

SOURCE: Pew Research Center, 2021

PERCENTAGE  of 13- to 17-year-olds in the U.S. who use TikTok, more than any other social media app.

SOURCE: Pew Researc h Center

159.75 million

NUMBER of Instagram users in the U.S. as of January 2022.

SOURCE: Statista

Is social media making us less social?

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

The Future of Social Media Is a Lot Less Social

Facebook, TikTok and Twitter seem to be increasingly connecting users with brands and influencers. To restore a sense of community, some users are trying smaller social networks.

By Brian X. Chen

Brian X. Chen is the lead consumer technology writer and author of Tech Fix , a column about the social implications of the tech we use.

Nearly two decades ago, Facebook exploded on college campuses as a site for students to stay in touch. Then came Twitter, where people posted about what they had for breakfast, and Instagram, where friends shared photos to keep up with one another.

Today, Instagram and Facebook feeds are full of ads and sponsored posts. TikTok and Snapchat are stuffed with videos from influencers promoting dish soaps and dating apps. And soon, Twitter posts that gain the most visibility will come mostly from subscribers who pay for the exposure and other perks .

Social media is, in many ways, becoming less social. The kinds of posts where people update friends and family about their lives have become harder to see over the years as the biggest sites have become increasingly “corporatized.” Instead of seeing messages and photos from friends and relatives about their holidays or fancy dinners, users of Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter and Snapchat now often view professionalized content from brands, influencers and others that pay for placement.

The change has implications for large social networking companies and how people interact with one another digitally. But it also raises questions about a core idea: the online platform. For years, the notion of a platform — an all-in-one, public-facing site where people spent most of their time — reigned supreme. But as big social networks made connecting people with brands a priority over connecting them with other people, some users have started seeking community-oriented sites and apps devoted to specific hobbies and issues.

“Platforms as we knew them are over,” said Zizi Papacharissi, a communications professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago, who teaches courses on social media. “They have outlived their utility.”

The shift helps explain why some social networking companies, which continue to have billions of users and pull in billions of dollars in revenue, are now exploring new avenues of business. Twitter, which is owned by Elon Musk, has been pushing people and brands to pay $8 to $1,000 a month to become subscribers . Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is moving into the immersive online world of the so-called metaverse .

For users, this means that instead of spending all their time on one or a few big social networks, some are gravitating toward smaller, more focused sites. These include Mastodon , which is essentially a Twitter clone sliced into communities; Nextdoor , a social network for neighbors to commiserate about quotidian issues like local potholes; and apps like Truth Social , which was started by former President Donald J. Trump and is viewed as a social network for conservatives.

“It’s not about choosing one network to rule them all — that is crazy Silicon Valley logic,” said Ethan Zuckerman, a professor of public policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “The future is that you’re a member of dozens of different communities, because as human beings, that’s how we are.”

Twitter, which automatically responds to press inquiries with a poop emoji, did not have a comment about the evolution of social networking. Meta declined to comment, and TikTok did not respond to a request for comment. Snap, the maker of Snapchat, said that although its app had evolved, connecting people with their friends and family remained its primary function.

A shift to smaller, more focused networks was predicted years ago by some of social media’s biggest names, including Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, and Jack Dorsey, a founder of Twitter.

In 2019, Mr. Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post that private messaging and small groups were the fastest-growing areas of online communication. Mr. Dorsey, who stepped down as Twitter’s chief executive in 2021, has pushed for so-called decentralized social networks that give people control over the content they see and the communities they engage with. He has recently been posting on Nostr , a social media site based on this principle.

Over the last year, technologists and academics have also focused on smaller social networks. In a paper published last month and titled “The Three-Legged Stool: A Manifesto for a Smaller, Denser Internet,” Mr. Zuckerman and other academics outlined how future companies could run small networks at low costs.

They also suggested the creation of an app that essentially acts as a Swiss Army knife of social networks by allowing people to switch among the sites they use, including Twitter, Mastodon, Reddit and smaller networks. One such app, called Gobo and developed by MIT Media Lab and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is set for release next month.

The tricky part for users is finding the newer, small networks because they are obscure. But broader social networks, like Mastodon or Reddit, often act as a gateway to smaller communities. When signing up for Mastodon, for example, people can choose a server from an extensive list , including those related to gaming, food and activism.

Eugen Rochko, Mastodon’s chief executive, said users were publishing over a billion posts a month across its communities and that there were no algorithms or ads altering people’s feeds.

One major benefit of small networks is that they create forums for specific communities, including people who are marginalized. Ahwaa , which was founded in 2011, is a social network for members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community in countries around the Persian Gulf where being gay is deemed illegal. Other small networks, like Letterboxd , an app for film enthusiasts to share their opinions on movies, are focused on special interests.

Smaller communities can also relieve some social pressure of using social media, especially for younger people. Over the last decade, stories have emerged — including in congressional hearings about the dangers of social media — about teenagers developing eating disorders after trying to live up to “Instagram perfect” photos and through watching videos on TikTok.

The idea that a new social media site might come along to be the one app for everyone appears unrealistic, experts say. When young people are done experimenting with a new network — such as BeReal, the photo-sharing app that was popular among teenagers last year but is now hemorrhaging millions of active users — they move on to the next one.

“They’re not going to be swayed by the first shiny platform that comes along,” Ms. Papacharissi said.

People’s online identities will become increasingly fragmented among multiple sites, she added. For talking about professional accomplishments, there’s LinkedIn. For playing video games with fellow gamers, there’s Discord . For discussing news stories, there’s Artifact.

“What we’re interested in is smaller groups of people who are communicating with each other about specific things,” Ms. Papacharissi said.

More small networks are likely on the horizon. Last year, Harvard University, where Mr. Zuckerberg founded Facebook in 2004 as a student, began a research program devoted to rebooting social media. The program helps students and others create and experiment with new networks together.

One app that emerged from the program, Minus , lets users publish only 100 posts on their timeline for life. The idea is to make people feel connected in an environment where their time together is treated as a precious and finite resource, unlike traditional social networks such as Facebook and Twitter that use infinite scrolling interfaces to keep users engaged for as long as possible.

“It’s a performance art experiment,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of law and computer science at Harvard who started the research initiative. “It’s the kind of thing that as soon as you see it, it doesn’t have to be this way.”

Brian X. Chen is the lead consumer technology writer for The Times. He reviews products and writes Tech Fix , a column about the social implications of the tech we use. Before joining The Times in 2011, he reported on Apple and the wireless industry for Wired. More about Brian X. Chen

Debate: For and against social networking - is social media technology making us more antisocial?

Communicating with other people is easier than ever, but is greater connection fuelling antisocial instincts?

For: social networking technology is making us more antisocial.

By Chris Edwards

In Mike Leigh's film 'Naked', Johnny is a near-sociopathic loser who doesn't interact with people so much as harangue them with bizarre theories on everything from barcodes to the meaninglessness of time. In hiding from a crime committed in Manchester, he tours London looking for lost souls to whom he can feel superior. Made in 1993, the year before the World Wide Web went mainstream, we could feel reassured that Johnny was a rarity. You would have to be very unlucky to run into someone like him on a bus or even in the pub.

But, thanks to the Web, an entire race of Johnnies has appeared, expounding with considerable hostility why their views on 9/11, the New World Order and life in general are hugely superior to anyone else's. Their opponents are shills, trolls or fools, or possibly all three.

Now, you can argue that the Internet has done much to bring people together. At the same time, it has made it easier for society to split into a huge number of in-groups who wage wars of words on the other.

Commenters on blogs or news articles do not just claim the author is wrong, but that they are a waste of skin that should die.

The Internet cartoon character John 'Gabe' Gabriel has a theory for it. It's the Greater Internet Fu... I'm sorry, I can't finish the name because it's not the sort of thing that you want to repeat in polite society. In summary, using just a blackboard sketch, Gabriel argues that there are two components to becoming an online sociopath: anonymity and an audience.

Almost a decade before Gabriel's summary made its way onto the Penny Arcade website, researcher Judith Donath analysed behaviour on Usenet, a precursor to today's Web-based 'fora'. Trolling - deliberately riling other users - had become a popular pastime and Donath set out to discover why. It's not just names that online discourse lacks, she found: "Many of the basic cues about personality and social role we are accustomed to in the physical world are absent.

Anyone who has had the tone in one of their emails misread will understand the problem. It's hard to convey the subtlety of face-to-face or telephone interaction using the most common form of online discourse: text. People use emoticons but they can convey an alternative, almost sinister meaning if the recipient reads it that way. Offence is not just easily given on the Internet; it's taken all too easily as well.

The exaggerated nature of online discourse, in which opening salvos in an exchange are often unnecessarily hostile, is arguably a consequence of Donath's observation of a lack of additional body language or other social cues. It might also be compensation for a lack of that stimulation to the brain.

Pioneering media researcher Marshall McLuhan wrote about the numbing effect of technology's ability to extend our bodies. It's fair to say that some of McLuhan's concepts do get a little muddled in his writing. He considered TV a 'hot medium' - one that demanded active involvement from the viewer - in contrast's to radio's status of a 'cool medium'. From today's perspective this seems at best an idiosyncratic notion if not just plain wrong. The TV doesn't get called the idiot box for nothing.

In 'Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man' - a book that predates the Web by 30 years - McLuhan thought the extensions to the self that technological gadgets provide allow people to separate from themselves. Like Narcissus, they become blind to the mirror that reality provides. Not only that, the increase in stimulation from these new external senses is beyond what the body can handle. "Shock induces a generalised numbness or an increased threshold to all types of perception. The victim seems immune to pain or sense."

Technology may help redress the balance and allow people to convey and read the subtle social signals we learn through real-world interactions. But as we have become more connected we have become disconnected from ourselves and each other.

Against:Social networking technology is not making us more antisocial

By Andy Pye

Advances in technology have been overwhelmingly beneficial for mankind. From the first tools honed out of flint by prehistoric man, to the latest cures for cancer, every innovation has made our lives that bit easier, longer, more comfortable. And yet, almost inevitably, each new idea comes with a "dark side". In building his Rocket, George Stephenson would not have envisaged that trains might one day be the implement of choice for stressed financiers contemplating suicide. In his work with electricity and magnetism, Michael Faraday would not have been concerned with the use of electricity in torturing dissidents and political prisoners.

The World Wide Web was 20 years old last year, and yet its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, would not have been held back by the concern that it could enable would-be terrorists to discover recipes for making fertiliser bombs, nor be a communications mechanism for paedophiles.

None of these problems would be proposed as a reason for stockpiling the idea. The benefits to mankind still outweigh the disadvantages. And so it is with social networking - a technology born out of modern communications that enables the sharing of information in an efficient manner with like-minded people.

As with all the technologies described above, it too can be abused. It is important to recognise how this happens, and how to build effective defences, but without shackling its potential with a metaphorical red flag, as Luddites once attempted to do with the motor car.

Carrying out risk assessments, to help identify potential problem areas, and build up a strategy for dealing with them, should be part of every development. If a mobile phone has potential for detonating improvised explosive devices, then the security forces need to have the capability to switch off the network when a risk is identified. This may, indeed, have happened already, in the recent 7/7 attacks in London.

Berners-Lee is one of the pioneer voices in favour of "net neutrality" and says that ISPs should supply "connectivity with no strings attached", and should neither control nor monitor customers' browsing activities without consent. He advocates the idea that net neutrality is a kind of human network rights.

There is no doubt that social networking was abused during the recent rioting in England's major cities. It enabled them to regroup faster than police forces were able to anticipate. These early concerns, however, can be mitigated by infiltrating groups, encouraging other members of the community to shop the yob element within, and by selectively disabling the social network at times of high risk.

Big sticks have to be part of the process. The higher the deterrent, the less likely it is that criminals will re-offend. The most effective way of emptying jails is to increase sentences. I recently spent some time in Kazakhstan, where robust policing is the norm. One method is to drive criminals 20km into the Steppe and leave them to walk home alone.

As the England cricket team reaches the exalted number one position in the world, the sport has worked tirelessly at grass roots level to introduce the sport - and the standards of social behaviour that it embraces - to youngsters. Holiday courses and training sessions for youngsters have never been fuller.

And the social networks - those same ones accused of being responsible for inciting rioting - are buzzing with youngsters sharing their experiences. Team selections are now posted on Facebook, rather than on the club noticeboard. The Kent Cricket Board has just appointed its first social networking officer.

The use of social networking as an enabler for criminals is a symptom of problems in our society, not the problem in itself. And just as other technological advances in our society, it should be encouraged to flourish as a force for good, while tackling the small minority of users who wish to use it for undesirable reasons.

• Facebook partnering with top universities to speed up VR and AI research
• Facebook could receive massive fine over ‘misleading’ WhatsApp takeover
• Facebook to crack down on fake news

You may also be interested in...

Zuckerberg in denial about Facebook’s media company status

Facebook needs to accept that it is becoming a traditional diversified conglomerate and the responsibilities that go with that

Real-world politics torpedo Facebook's virtual pioneer

How Palmer Luckey slid from boy-wonder VR entrepreneur to man-child dimwit in a single weekend.

Google appeals global 'right to be forgotten' extension by France

Google has appealed against an order from the French data protection authority to remove certain web search results globally in response to a European privacy ruling, escalating a fight on the extra-territorial reach of EU law.

Twitter's 140-character limit to exclude photos and links

Twitter users will soon have more flexibility in writing tweets because the company reportedly plans to stop including photos and links as part of its 140-character limit.

Twitter to increase character limit 'up to 10 000'

Twitter is set to increase the number of characters allowed in a single tweet to 10,000 from the current limit of 140.

Zuckerberg to code household AI system

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has announced plans to build an artificial intelligence system to help him manage his home.

More from Debate

Can we beat OpenAI's chatbot?

OpenAI's conversational AI chatbot ChatGPT exposes some of our own failings when it comes to making arguments.

Debate: For and against space exploration - is space research a waste of time?

This house believes that in a time of collapsing national economies and worldwide austerity measures, investment in space is a bad use of resources.

Debate: For and against climate change

Have scientists been responsible for exaggerating the extent to which human activity is affecting the global climate?

Debate: For and against traditional media - are printed newspapers on the way out?

With Boris Johnson campaigning to ‘save the Guardian’, our experts turn their attention to debating whether we will realistically still be reading ‘paper’ newspapers in five years,

More from Facebook

Meta to be investigated by the EU for its handling of election disinformation

Meta to allow users to unlink their Instagram and Facebook accounts as EU rule takes effect

What Exactly is the Metaverse?

Widespread study claims Facebook does not cause its users psychological harm

Oxford University researchers have claimed there is no evidence to suggest that Facebook causes its users widespread psychological harm.

More from Social Networks

UK considers a ban on social media for children under 16, reports say

UK investigates TikTok over parental control concerns

TikTok spends $1.5bn to reopen its online store in Indonesia

Nepal bans TikTok, accusing the app of ‘disrupting social harmony’

View the discussion thread.

TED is supported by ads and partners 00:00

Social Media is Making Us Unsocial

Yes, Social Media Really Is Undermining Democracy

Despite what Meta has to say.

W ithin the past 15 years, social media has insinuated itself into American life more deeply than food-delivery apps into our diets and microplastics into our bloodstreams. Look at stories about conflict, and it’s often lurking in the background. Recent articles on the rising dysfunction within progressive organizations point to the role of Twitter, Slack, and other platforms in prompting “endless and sprawling internal microbattles,” as The Intercept ’s Ryan Grim put it, referring to the ACLU. At a far higher level of conflict, the congressional hearings about the January 6 insurrection show us how Donald Trump’s tweets summoned the mob to Washington and aimed it at the vice president. Far-right groups then used a variety of platforms to coordinate and carry out the attack.

Social media has changed life in America in a thousand ways, and nearly two out of three Americans now believe that these changes are for the worse. But academic researchers have not yet reached a consensus that social media is harmful. That’s been a boon to social-media companies such as Meta, which argues, as did tobacco companies, that the science is not “ settled .”

The lack of consensus leaves open the possibility that social media may not be very harmful. Perhaps we’ve fallen prey to yet another moral panic about a new technology and, as with television, we’ll worry about it less after a few decades of conflicting studies. A different possibility is that social media is quite harmful but is changing too quickly for social scientists to capture its effects. The research community is built on a quasi-moral norm of skepticism: We begin by assuming the null hypothesis (in this case, that social media is not harmful), and we require researchers to show strong, statistically significant evidence in order to publish their findings. This takes time—a couple of years, typically, to conduct and publish a study; five or more years before review papers and meta-analyses come out; sometimes decades before scholars reach agreement. Social-media platforms, meanwhile, can change dramatically in just a few years .

So even if social media really did begin to undermine democracy (and institutional trust and teen mental health ) in the early 2010s, we should not expect social science to “settle” the matter until the 2030s. By then, the effects of social media will be radically different, and the harms done in earlier decades may be irreversible.

Let me back up. This spring, The Atlantic published my essay “ Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid ,” in which I argued that the best way to understand the chaos and fragmentation of American society is to see ourselves as citizens of Babel in the days after God rendered them unable to understand one another.

I showed how a few small changes to the architecture of social-media platforms, implemented from 2009 to 2012, increased the virality of posts on those platforms, which then changed the nature of social relationships. People could spread rumors and half-truths more quickly, and they could more readily sort themselves into homogenous tribes. Even more important, in my view, was that social-media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook could now be used more easily by anyone to attack anyone. It was as if the platforms had passed out a billion little dart guns, and although most users didn’t want to shoot anyone, three kinds of people began darting others with abandon: the far right, the far left, and trolls.

Jonathan Haidt and Tobias Rose-Stockwell: The dark psychology of social networks

All of these groups were suddenly given the power to dominate conversations and intimidate dissenters into silence. A fourth group—Russian agents––also got a boost, though they didn’t need to attack people directly. Their long-running project, which ramped up online in 2013, was to fabricate, exaggerate, or simply promote stories that would increase Americans’ hatred of one another and distrust of their institutions.

The essay proved to be surprisingly uncontroversial—or, at least, hardly anyone attacked me on social media. But a few responses were published, including one from Meta (formerly Facebook), which pointed to studies it said contradicted my argument. There was also an essay in The New Yorker by Gideon Lewis-Kraus, who interviewed me and other scholars who study politics and social media. He argued that social media might well be harmful to democracies, but the research literature is too muddy and contradictory to support firm conclusions.

So was my diagnosis correct, or are concerns about social media overblown? It’s a crucial question for the future of our society. As I argued in my essay, critics make us smarter. I’m grateful, therefore, to Meta and the researchers interviewed by Lewis-Kraus for helping me sharpen and extend my argument in three ways.

Are Democracies Becoming More Polarized and Less Healthy?

My essay laid out a wide array of harms that social media has inflicted on society. Political polarization is just one of them, but it is central to the story of rising democratic dysfunction.

Meta questioned whether social media should be blamed for increased polarization. In response to my essay, Meta’s head of research, Pratiti Raychoudhury, pointed to a study by Levi Boxell, Matthew Gentzkow, and Jesse Shapiro that looked at trends in 12 countries and found, she said, “that in some countries polarization was on the rise before Facebook even existed, and in others it has been decreasing while internet and Facebook use increased.” In a recent interview with the podcaster Lex Fridman , Mark Zuckerberg cited this same study in support of a more audacious claim: “Most of the academic studies that I’ve seen actually show that social-media use is correlated with lower polarization.”

Does that study really let social media off the hook? It plotted political polarization based on survey responses in 12 countries, most with data stretching back to the 1970s, and then drew straight lines that best fit the data points over several decades. It’s true that, while some lines sloped upward (meaning that polarization increased across the period as a whole), others sloped downward. But my argument wasn’t about the past 50 years. It was about a phase change that happened in the early 2010s , after Facebook and Twitter changed their architecture to enable hyper-virality.

I emailed Gentzkow to ask whether he could put a “hinge” in the graphs in the early 2010s, to see if the trends in polarization changed direction or accelerated in the past decade. He replied that there was not enough data after 2010 to make such an analysis reliable. He also noted that Meta’s response essay had failed to cite a 2020 article in which he and three colleagues found that randomly assigning participants to deactivate Facebook for the four weeks before the 2018 U.S. midterm elections reduced polarization.

Adrienne LaFrance: ‘History will not judge us kindly’

Meta’s response motivated me to look for additional publications to evaluate what had happened to democracies in the 2010s. I discovered four. One of them found no overall trend in polarization, but like the study by Boxell, Gentzkow, and Shapiro, it had few data points after 2015. The other three had data through 2020, and all three reported substantial increases in polarization and/or declines in the number or quality of democracies around the world.

One of them, a 2022 report from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute, found that “liberal democracies peaked in 2012 with 42 countries and are now down to the lowest levels in over 25 years.” It summarized the transformations of global democracy over the past 10 years in stark terms:

Just ten years ago the world looked very different from today. In 2011, there were more countries improving than declining on every aspect of democracy. By 2021 the world has been turned on its head: there are more countries declining than advancing on nearly all democratic aspects captured by V-Dem measures.

The report also notes that “toxic polarization”—signaled by declining “respect for counter-arguments and associated aspects of the deliberative component of democracy”—grew more severe in at least 32 countries.

A paper published one week after my Atlantic essay, by Yunus E. Orhan, found a global spike in democratic “backsliding” since 2008, and linked it to affective polarization, or animosity toward the other side. When affective polarization is high, partisans tolerate antidemocratic behavior by politicians on their own side––such as the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

And finally, the Economist Intelligence Unit reported a global decline in various democratic measures starting after 2015, according to its Democracy Index.

These three studies cannot prove that social media caused the global decline, but—contra Meta and Zuckerberg—they show a global trend toward polarization in the previous decade, the one in which the world embraced social media.

Has Social Media Created Harmful Echo Chambers?

So why did democracies weaken in the 2010s? How might social media have made them more fragmented and less stable? One popular argument contends that social media sorts users into echo chambers––closed communities of like-minded people. Lack of contact with people who hold different viewpoints allows a sort of tribal groupthink to take hold, reducing the quality of everyone’s thinking and the prospects for compromise that are essential in a democratic system.

According to Meta, however, “More and more research discredits the idea that social media algorithms create an echo chamber.” It points to two sources to back up that claim, but many studies show evidence that social media does in fact create echo chambers. Because conflicting studies are common in social-science research, I created a “ collaborative review ” document last year with Chris Bail, a sociologist at Duke University who studies social media. It’s a public Google doc in which we organize the abstracts of all the studies we can find about social media’s impact on democracy, and then we invite other experts to add studies, comments, and criticisms. We cover research on seven different questions, including whether social media promotes echo chambers. After spending time in the document, Lewis-Kraus wrote in The New Yorker : “The upshot seemed to me to be that exactly nothing was unambiguously clear.”

He is certainly right that nothing is unambiguous. But as I have learned from curating three such documents , researchers often reach opposing conclusions because they have “operationalized” the question differently. That is, they have chosen different ways to turn an abstract question (about the prevalence of echo chambers, say) into something concrete and measurable. For example, researchers who choose to measure echo chambers by looking at the diversity of people’s news consumption typically find little evidence that they exist at all. Even partisans end up being exposed to news stories and videos from the other side. Both of the sources that Raychoudhury cited in her defense of Meta mention this idea.

Derek Thompson: Social media is attention alcohol

But researchers who measure echo chambers by looking at social relationships and networks usually find evidence of “homophily”—that is, people tend to engage with others who are similar to themselves. One study of politically engaged Twitter users, for example, found that they “are disproportionately exposed to like-minded information and that information reaches like-minded users more quickly.” So should we throw up our hands and say that the findings are irreconcilable? No, we should integrate them, as the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci did in a 2018 essay . Coming across contrary viewpoints on social media, she wrote, is “not like reading them in a newspaper while sitting alone.” Rather, she said, “it’s like hearing them from the opposing team while sitting with our fellow fans in a football stadium … We bond with our team by yelling at the fans of the other one.” Mere exposure to different sources of news doesn’t automatically break open echo chambers; in fact, it can reinforce them.

These closely bonded groupings can have profound political ramifications, as a couple of my critics in the New Yorker article acknowledged. A major feature of the post-Babel world is that the extremes are now far louder and more influential than before. They may also become more violent. Recent research by Morteza Dehghani and his colleagues at the University of Southern California shows that people are more willing to commit violence when they are immersed in a community they perceive to be morally homogeneous.

This finding seems to be borne out by a statement from the 18-year-old man who recently killed 10 Black Americans at a supermarket in Buffalo. In the Q&A portion of the manifesto attributed to him, he wrote:

Where did you get your current beliefs? Mostly from the internet. There was little to no influence on my personal beliefs by people I met in person.

The killer goes on to claim that he had read information “from all ideologies,” but I find it unlikely that he consumed a balanced informational diet, or, more important, that he hung out online with ideologically diverse users. The fact that he livestreamed his shooting tells us he assumed that his community shared his warped worldview. He could not have found such an extreme yet homogeneous group in his small town 200 miles from Buffalo. But thanks to social media, he found an international fellowship of extreme racists who jointly worshipped past mass murderers and from whom he copied sections of his manifesto.

Is Social Media the Primary Villain in This Story?

In her response to my essay, Raychoudhury did not deny that Meta bore any blame. Rather, her defense was two-pronged, arguing that the research is not yet definitive, and that, in any case, we should be focusing on mainstream media as the primary cause of harm.

Raychoudhury pointed to a study on the role of cable TV and mainstream media as major drivers of partisanship. She is correct to do so: The American culture war has roots going back to the turmoil of the 1960s, which activated evangelicals and other conservatives in the ’70s. Social media (which arrived around 2004 and became truly pernicious, I argue, only after 2009) is indeed a more recent player in this phenomenon.

In my essay, I included a paragraph on this backstory, noting the role of Fox News and the radicalizing Republican Party of the ’90s, but I should have said more. The story of polarization is complex, and political scientists cite a variety of contributing factors , including the growing politicization of the urban-rural divide; rising immigration; the increasing power of big and very partisan donors; the loss of a common enemy when the Soviet Union collapsed; and the loss of the “Greatest Generation,” which had an ethos of service forged in the crisis of the Second World War. And although polarization rose rapidly in the 2010s, the rise began in the ’90s, so I cannot pin the majority of the rise on social media.

But my essay wasn’t primarily about ordinary polarization. I was trying to explain a new dynamic that emerged in the 2010s: the fear of one another , even—and perhaps especially––within groups that share political or cultural affinities. This fear has created a whole new set of social and political problems.

The loss of a common enemy and those other trends with roots in the 20th century can help explain America’s ever nastier cross-party relationships, but they can’t explain why so many college students and professors suddenly began to express more fear, and engage in more self-censorship, around 2015. These mostly left-leaning people weren’t worried about the “other side”; they were afraid of a small number of students who were further to the left, and who enthusiastically hunted for verbal transgressions and used social media to publicly shame offenders.

A few years later, that same fearful dynamic spread to newsrooms , companies , nonprofit organizations , and many other parts of society . The culture war had been running for two or three decades by then, but it changed in the mid-2010s when ordinary people with little to no public profile suddenly became the targets of social-media mobs. Consider the famous 2013 case of Justine Sacco , who tweeted an insensitive joke about her trip to South Africa just before boarding her flight in London and became an international villain by the time she landed in Cape Town. She was fired the next day. Or consider the the far right’s penchant for using social media to publicize the names and photographs of largely unknown local election officials, health officials, and school-board members who refuse to bow to political pressure, and who are then subjected to waves of vitriol, including threats of violence to themselves and their children, simply for doing their jobs. These phenomena, now common to the culture, could not have happened before the advent of hyper-viral social media in 2009.

Matthew Hindman, Nathaniel Lubin, and Trevor Davis: Facebook has a superuser-supremacy problem

This fear of getting shamed, reported, doxxed, fired, or physically attacked is responsible for the self-censorship and silencing of dissent that were the main focus of my essay. When dissent within any group or institution is stifled, the group will become less perceptive, nimble, and effective over time.

Social media may not be the primary cause of polarization, but it is an important cause, and one we can do something about. I believe it is also the primary cause of the epidemic of structural stupidity, as I called it, that has recently afflicted many of America’s key institutions.

What Can We Do to Make Things Better?

My essay presented a series of structural solutions that would allow us to repair some of the damage that social media has caused to our key democratic and epistemic institutions. I proposed three imperatives: (1) harden democratic institutions so that they can withstand chronic anger and mistrust, (2) reform social media so that it becomes less socially corrosive, and (3) better prepare the next generation for democratic citizenship in this new age.

I believe that we should begin implementing these reforms now, even if the science is not yet “settled.” Beyond a reasonable doubt is the appropriate standard of evidence for reviewers guarding admission to a scientific journal, or for jurors establishing guilt in a criminal trial. It is too high a bar for questions about public health or threats to the body politic. A more appropriate standard is the one used in civil trials: the preponderance of evidence. Is social media probably damaging American democracy via at least one of the seven pathways analyzed in our collaborative-review document , or probably not ? I urge readers to examine the document themselves. I also urge the social-science community to find quicker ways to study potential threats such as social media, where platforms and their effects change rapidly. Our motto should be “Move fast and test things.” Collaborative-review documents are one way to speed up the process by which scholars find and respond to one another’s work.

Beyond these structural solutions, I considered adding a short section to the article on what each of us can do as individuals, but it sounded a bit too preachy, so I cut it. I now regret that decision. I should have noted that all of us, as individuals, can be part of the solution by choosing to act with courage, moderation, and compassion. It takes a great deal of resolve to speak publicly or stand your ground when a barrage of snide, disparaging, and otherwise hostile comments is coming at you and nobody rises to your defense (out of fear of getting attacked themselves).

Read: How to fix Twitter—and all of social media

Fortunately, social media does not usually reflect real life, something that more people are beginning to understand. A few years ago, I heard an insight from an older business executive. He noted that before social media, if he received a dozen angry letters or emails from customers, they spurred him to action because he assumed that there must be a thousand other disgruntled customers who didn’t bother to write. But now, if a thousand people like an angry tweet or Facebook post about his company, he assumes that there must be a dozen people who are really upset.

Seeing that social-media outrage is transient and performative should make it easier to withstand, whether you are the president of a university or a parent speaking at a school-board meeting. We can all do more to offer honest dissent and support the dissenters within institutions that have become structurally stupid. We can all get better at listening with an open mind and speaking in order to engage another human being rather than impress an audience. Teaching these skills to our children and our students is crucial, because they are the generation who will have to reinvent deliberative democracy and Tocqueville’s “art of association” for the digital age.

We must act with compassion too. The fear and cruelty of the post-Babel era are a result of its tendency to reward public displays of aggression. Social media has put us all in the middle of a Roman coliseum, and many in the audience want to see conflict and blood. But once we realize that we are the gladiators—tricked into combat so that we might generate “content,” “engagement,” and revenue—we can refuse to fight. We can be more understanding toward our fellow citizens, seeing that we are all being driven mad by companies that use largely the same set of psychological tricks. We can forswear public conflict and use social media to serve our own purposes, which for most people will mean more private communication and fewer public performances.

The post-Babel world will not be rebuilt by today’s technology companies. That work will be left to citizens who understand the forces that brought us to the verge of self-destruction, and who develop the new habits, virtues, technologies, and shared narratives that will allow us to reap the benefits of living and working together in peace.

Home — Essay Samples — Sociology — Effects of Social Media — How Social Media Is Making Us Less Social

How Social Media is Making Us Less Social

• Categories: Effects of Social Media Socialization

About this sample

Words: 728 |

Updated: 4 December, 2023

Words: 728 | Pages: 2 | 4 min read

• Bartlett, J., Reffin, J., Rumball, N., & Williamson, S. (2014). Anti-social media. Demos, 2014, 1-51. (https://apo.org.au/node/37598)
• Power, D. J., & Phillips-Wren, G. (2011). Impact of social media and Web 2.0 on decision-making. Journal of decision systems, 20(3), 249-261. (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3166/jds.20.249-261)
• Nair, M. (2011). Understanding and measuring the value of social media. Journal of Corporate Accounting & Finance, 22(3), 45-51. (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jcaf.20674)
• De Choudhury, M., Gamon, M., Counts, S., & Horvitz, E. (2013). Predicting depression via social media. In Proceedings of the international AAAI conference on web and social media (Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 128-137). (https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/14432)
• Wright, D. K., & Hinson, M. D. (2008). How blogs and social media are changing public relations and the way it is practiced. Public relations journal, 2(2), 1-21. (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228845581_How_Blogs_and_Social_Media_are_Changing_Public_Relations_and_the_Way_it_is_Practiced)

Video Version

Cite this Essay

Let us write you an essay from scratch

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Get high-quality help

Dr. Heisenberg

Verified writer

• Expert in: Sociology

+ 120 experts online

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Related Essays

4 pages / 1649 words

4 pages / 1775 words

10 pages / 4490 words

2 pages / 689 words

Remember! This is just a sample.

You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers.

121 writers online

Still can’t find what you need?

Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled

Related Essays on Effects of Social Media

Achieng, Jackline. “Cultural Beauty Practices From Around The World That You’ve Probably Never Heard Of.” Culture Trip, 7 May 2018, [...]

Alton, L. (2017, May 15). Is Working From Home Making You Feel Miserable?. NBC news. Retrieved from https://www.inc.com/amy-morin/heres-why-internet-has-made-us-lonelier-than-ever.html

Ballaro, B., & Wagner, A. (n.d.). Body Image in the Media. In Media and Society (pp. 72-83). Retrieved from [...]

Primack, B. A. (n.d.). Social Media Use and Perceived Social Isolation Among Young Adults in the U.S. Emotion, 17(6), 1026–1032. DOI: 10.1037/emo0000525Hobson, K. (n.d.). The Social Media Paradox: Are We Really More Connected? [...]

Freedom of speech is a right given to all Americans at birth, and this is guaranteed by the First Amendment. But many do not understand that this is slowly being taken away as social media becomes more governmental over what we [...]

Teenage boys and girls spend their digital media time in different ways: boys spend more time gaming, while girls spend more time texting and using social media, particularly apps like Snapchat and Instagram. Naturally, the more [...]

Related Topics

By clicking “Send”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails.

Where do you want us to send this sample?

By clicking “Continue”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy.

Be careful. This essay is not unique

This essay was donated by a student and is likely to have been used and submitted before

Download this Sample

Free samples may contain mistakes and not unique parts

Sorry, we could not paraphrase this essay. Our professional writers can rewrite it and get you a unique paper.

Please check your inbox.

We can write you a custom essay that will follow your exact instructions and meet the deadlines. Let's fix your grades together!

Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free

Social Media is Making us Unsocial

October 5, 2020.

A Ted Talk by Kristin Gallucci, a Marketer, specialized in LinkedIn Advertising, shared an experience of a social media conference she attended. She shared how she was trying to interact with people, influencers present there, but was continually being ignored. She also mentioned that people over there chose to connect via social media rather than personally. They were choosing social media over a relationship.

The very first recognizable social media came in 1997 and was called ‘Six Degrees.’ But the real explosion in social media took place once blogging started. And since then, after two decades, we have come a long way. According to Statista data of 2019, an average human today is spending around 144 minutes on social media daily, and this is increasing by two minutes everyday [1]. It turns out to be 5.5 years of an average person’s lifetime being spent on social media. I had my first social media account on Orkut way back in 2010. And today, I am so much involved that I had to take a harsh step; millennials call this by a fancy word, ‘Social Media Detox.’

Social media has made the world a better place for us. But it has also been killing our relationships. Those long discussions in hostel rooms, cousins laughing after seeing old photo albums, and those random conversations in trains; it seems like all this is fading away. Social Media has replaced our experiences as well. While dining out, we let our food get cold to click those perfect images and share them online. Social media today has made us dependent on how people perceive us. We are in dire need of them to like us. But what about the ones who already like us. To them, we are just giving out reasons to dislike us.

According to a study in the USA, between 2009 and 2017, the depression rate increased by 60% among kids from age 14 to 17 [3]. It was also found that for every 10% rise in negative experiences on social media, there can be seen a 13% rise in loneliness. Another survey shows that 37% of teens, between 12 to17, have been bullied online, and more than half of the LGBTQ community faces online harassment. 23% of students are involved directly or indirectly in cyberbullying activities. [2]

Henceforth, I would now like to introduce a phenomenon that exists just because of social media, ‘Slacktivism.’ Slacktivism is the practice of supporting political or social causes utilizing Social Media and is characterized by lesser efforts and commitment. Social causes are what we as humans fight for to make this world a better place. And these causes have been a driving factor in the growth of humans as a race. We are somewhere losing our driving forces behind the face of social media.

In the end, I would like to say that it is not the technology that is to be blamed for making us unsocial, but us humans. We always strive to move forward, and we will make technology to move forward as well. But we can’t be blaming everything on it, because it is us who has created technology and we need it. The human race has come so far, just because of one point of differentiation, our ability to socialize. And if we are giving that away like this, do we even deserve to be this species?

About the Author

Aniket Singh is pursuing his MBA from IIM Udaipur and has an inclination towards Marketing. He is a Mechanical Engineer by profession and hails form the sports city of India, Meerut. Coming from an Armed Forces background, he has had the opportunity to stay and experience the cultural diversity of the country. He is a rubix cube enthusiast and a fan of the series “How I Met Your Mother.” You can connect with him on LinkedIn

• https://www.statista.com/statistics/433871/daily-social-media-usage-worldwide/
• https://www.dosomething.org/us/facts/11-facts-about-cyber-bullying#fnref1
• https://time.com/5550803/depression-suicide-rates-youth/
• StumbleUpon

Pin It on Pinterest

The  AVM  Theory

Individuality makes us different, respect brings us together.

• Anushri Gharbude
• Jan 5, 2022

Is Social Media Making Us Antisocial?

A conversation that's plaguing both youngsters and adults; the impact of social media and chat tools on our lives has always been debated, and it is impossible to conclude whether it's good or bad. Too much is too bad. It is true with all aspects of life, isn't it?

Statistics show how social media is hampering lives on many fronts, be it personal, family, or professional. It is an age where popularity is based on the number of likes. As a result, we are becoming more antisocial by being more active on social media sites.

Since social media is a massive superpower today, it is on us to take responsibility and control it. It has given us a fantastic advantage to communicate, share our ideas and opinions, and bring people from all around the world together. However, at the same time, it has also made it easy for people to fake their lives, spread lies, and become more insecure about themselves.

Instead of us controlling our social media, social media controls us. However, every person should know that they are not defined by the number of likes, comments, and followers on their social media. There is no way that a single account on social media can encapsulate the brilliant unique personality of a human being. On social media, we are not paying for the product, but we are the product, and we are letting others attribute value to us and get experimented on.

Because of social media, we walk around searching for feedback and pleasing other people while the only approval we need is of ourselves and no one else. 99% of our lives, the significant portion, the behind-the-scenes, the unglamorous, unfiltered, day-to-day mundane normality is never shown on social media, and we end up comparing our behind-the-scenes to other peoples fake Highlight Reel.

Moreover, using others as a mirror or benchmark for how we should look, how successful we should be, or how we should live our lives.

Social media is like an empty road with no traffic lights, zebra crossing, or maps and no one to guide you for where to go. If you take the right turn, have correct judgment, and know your limits, you are safe and on the right path, but one wrong turn can make you forget your reality, make you conscious about yourself, cause anxiety, depression, and so much more.

You will become your happy self, a better half, when you stop putting pressure on yourself to become someone else. As snobbish as it may sound, everyone needs to be full of self-worth. The truth is that when you know you are doing the right thing in your own eyes, it will hardly matter what others say. Everyone has different expectations, values, and perceptions. There is no right or wrong. Sometimes it is just society and social pressures because we pester ourselves to look perfect, and social media fuels this fire. The truth is that a picture will always tell an incomplete story, and it is on us how much we let it affect our lives.

The rising influence of social media has pushed people to live on the web. Eating out for a photo, travelling for a photo, squandering money for a perfect photo, and without a doubt, it has become a dystopian society of deceit.

It doesn't matter how active you are on these channels. The impact that you create and the value you add to social matters. Let's all become humans from digital beings. Let's rekindle the family dinners, hang out with friends and interact with our hearts.

• Social Issues

Recent Posts

Me, Myself, and I

The Perfection Fallacy

For The Children's Sake, Let Peace Be Found

Pros And Cons Of Social Media Make Us Anti-Social

Does Social Media makes us Anti-Social? Fabian de Rond English/ B2 Brigitte van Pelt - Hinkle Avans University of Applied Sciences Social media makes us anti-social The claim of this paper is: ‘’Does social media makes us anti-social?’’. Many people have a social media account these days. For example, Facebook had reached 1 billion users in October 2012. The use of social media is still increasing. It is nice to see that a lot of people have fun with social media, but it harms our real social life. In fact, social media makes us anti-social. The reason for these thought is because we use social media in traffic which is anti-social. Also a survey shows us that a lot of people are irritated by smartphone use during conversations. If you irritate another person, you’re producing anti-social behavior. Furthermore, because of the smartphone use we are lacking our social skills in real life. Challenging my own topic …show more content…

On every issue there is a pro and a con side. So this paper begins with the argument for the con side. Social media doesn’t make us anti-social because we can stay easier in contact with people we were friends with in the past, but the real contact has been reduced because you went other ways. Think about old friends from school and acquaintances. Giving a call to that person or seeing each other is most of the time, a waste of the time. Also it costs too much effort. (mijn kijk op infonu, 2013). So this argument explains why we are more social with social media. On the other hand I think that staying in contact with people from the past just increases our anti-social behavior, because it will decrease the social contact with the people from the present. Those are the people you want to take effort for and communicate with in real

What’s Wrong with Social Networking by Juno Parrenos

Although sites are interesting, they can keep you away from being social. In the article, “What’s Wrong with Social Networking”, the author, Juno Parrenas, claims, “In the age of smart phone, we all find ourselves at the dinner tables with at least on anti-social person peering at their phone mid-conversation or grabbing their phones to take Instagram snapshots of every course of the meal”(1). It is very disturbing to know that some human beings do not take the time the time to sit and instead, get on their phone.

Age and Loneliness in The Awakening and The Yellow Wall Paper

Social media has guided us to believe that we need to be connected to others. “…the social media revolution has not made us feel more connected, less lonely, or replete with friends” (Barna Group). Social media has input certain beliefs into the minds of people while also taking away that time that could be spent with friends and family. Social media has allowed people to put on fronts and believe that these are the only means of communication.

Is Facebook Making Us Lonely Analysis

Social media, like Facebook and Twitter seems to be growing popular worldwide in the last few years. Have you found yourself or someone else in an awkward situation and instantly pull out your phone to scrawl through Facebook or Twitter just to keep from talking to someone in the elevator or doctor’s office? Is social media like Facebook and Twitter making us lonely human beings? One man, Stephen Marche, wrote “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely,” published in May of 2012 issue in The Atlantic thinks that social media might play a role in it alongside with other things.

The Limits Of Friendship By Maria Konnikova

In “The Limits of Friendship” by Maria Konnikova, social media has significantly changed the way we interact with friends and family. Everybody thinks that using social media is the best way to talk to friends and family, however, in my opinion, they are wrong because it doesn’t give you the face-to-face connections we need as humans for social interaction. On the other hand, the great thing about using social media is you can connect with more people, but in a superficial kind of way. Therefore, we do not get the face-to-face interactions with our friends and family. We, the people that are addicted to social media, learn that without face-to-face conversations we wouldn’t have a normal “social” life outside of social media. The question

When Your Smartphone Is Too Smart For Your Own Good : How Social Media Alters Human Relationships

Humans are naturally social beings. Jeremy Rifkin states, “We are, it appears, the most social of animals and seek intimate participation and companionship with our fellows (115).” The article continues to explain how humans seem to connect through emotions and that inner, neurological need for human interaction. When one person feels pain, joy, or sadness, they want to share their feelings with another person. Hence, the needing fulfillment of social interaction. However, the use of social media does not mean humans have become less social. Even though social media has introduced a new way of interacting and communicating, studies have shown that people are becoming more

Pros And Cons Of Social Media Essay

These drawbacks include too many people being reliant to talking online rather than in person and not verbally communicating with friends even though they are in the same room. Jasmine Fowlkes shows the reality in how social media is affecting our new generation through her article, “Viewpoint: Why Social Media is Destroying our Social Skills.” After discussing the results conducted by several researchers, Fowlkes states,“As more generations are born into the social age, social media will continue to be the favored communication form among young people. However, this shift may begin to affect their ability to properly communicate in person with peers.” Many start to rely on applications on our devices to talk to people, but this results in less verbal communication. In addition, Kelly-Fay’s Talktrack research study showed that conversations held in person are much more impactful than on social media. Rather than making social media a huge part of your life, Fowlkes wishes that people would look up from their phones and engage more with others since that could change their lives.

Fahrenheit 451 Essay

Our society has evolved very much over time. The technology, has impacted it greatly. With technology in our lives, we find ourselves ‘glued’ to our electronics. Now, the question is, what does social media provide us? In Wu’s article, he states, “The devices we use change the way we live much faster than any contest among genes.” Meaning, we rely on these devices to make us happy, and resort to them when we are bored. Similarly, in Castells article, he says, “Media often report that intense use of the Internet increases the risk of isolation, alienation, and withdrawal from society.” However, the article also says that social media has actually “increased sociability, civic engagement, and the intensity of family and friendship relationships, in all cultures.” Answering the question, we actually get something out of using social media. We are allowed to communicate with

Technology In Ray Bradbury's 'Fahrenheit 451'

Although many argue that social media is an easier way to interact with others and that it has the ability to improve relationships by keeping those that are far apart together through technology, social media can also cause people to further distance themselves and it can also have a negative impact on relationships. There has been many studies that proves that technology harms our relationships and how one interacts with other in social situations. Many people use technology as a way to escape the real world. Even though social media can be used in a positive way, it can also be used negatively. Before technology was as developed as it is in today’s society, people had different realities; separation between work life and personal life.

Sociological Impact On Social Media

With the proliferation of technologies, especially the Internet, social networking has become ubiquitous in the modern world. Social networking tools like Facebook, Twitter, etc. are the impetus that is ever facilitating rapid creation and exchange of ideas to promote and aid communication. Humans interact by being social, therefore sociology analyses the changes in the social trend. Understanding the sociological perspective on the effects of social media, we find that the social aspect has changed. Comparing the past and present status of our society, it is obvious that there has been a transformation which all points towards the evolution of social media. Social media has changed our culture and has impacted on the way people meet, interact and share ideas; it has changed the perception of how people should communicate with the society. Social interactions have been defined to be an exchange among individuals with the aim of strengthening the society. Social interaction is building block in every society when people meet and interact; they define rules, systems, and institutions in which they will live by. On the other hand, social media is known as a platform that allows people to network and socialize through applications and websites that have been innovated. Though social media could be used as a useful tool to communicate with friends, family and even with people you do not know, however, researchers show that social media is absolutely harming human's skills to have

Social Media And Social Care Essay

This report will determine how the populace is affected by social media, and examine the outcomes. The addictive side of social media is explored, as well as the fast moving information and whether social media inhibits socialisation.

finale Essay

With the power of social media and the internet, we can connect globally in a way that was not possible before. Unfortunately, I do have to admit that it does take away a more personable interaction. Most people will connect with Facebook versus taking the time to see the person. For example, in the reading, “I’m Still Here: Back Online after a Year without the Internet” by Paul Miller, he said “It is the boredom and lack of stimulation that drives me to do things I really care about, like writing and spending time with others” (4). When we get bored, we want to do things we have never done before. The downside is, that there is people that rather kill that time on their devices. Rather than, cleaning their room or explore the world for those valuable 20 minutes they will text their life away. If everyone, was to go a month without the internet, the world would probably end. Everyone is so addicted to this new era of devices.

Human Contact Authentic

Society today sees technology as a beneficial tool; however, it ultimately damages relationships by distorting the perception of what authentic human contact is. While providing the ability to keep in touch with friends around the world and share memories, social media definitely has negative effects on our society. For example, the fundamental criteria for what makes human contact authentic is damaged, and is at risk of extinction due to the role social media plays in our society.

Anti Social Research Paper

Now a day is it good to be social? It is better to communicate face to face than to text on your phone. Since the 2000's everyone has started to rely on technology way too much, more than we should be. Even though social media enables people connect all over the world, social media is leading to less face to face communication. Because the use of technology is leading away from communicating and people are becoming addicted to social media and technology. Technology is leading us to be a lot less social than we were.

Social Media On Real World Friendships And Interactions

Social media such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Instagram, and Flicker was invented to keep us in touch and keep us closer to our family and friends. But according to How Facebook ruins Friendships “we took our friendship online” (Bernstein). First we began communicating more by email than by phone and then switched to instant messaging or texting. By joining social Medias online

Informative Essay On Social Media

People begin to connect more and more every day with the power of social media. Whether someone is thousands of miles away or a few blocks from your house there is the possibility of finding them on social media. The question is, with all the connecting possible through social media does it make us more distant to one another? With today’s youth, social media begins to take over one’s life and become their main source of interacting. Social media is possibly one of the best and worst creations in the modern world but the cons definitely triumph over the pros.

Related Topics

• Social relation

Sushant University blog

AHEAD. FOR LIFE.

Is Social media making us antisocial

I remember back in Nepal I visited a popular café where there was a board saying “WE DON’T HAVE WIFI CONNECTION LETS PRETEND IT IS 90s AND LET’S TALK TO EACH OTHER”

Yes, even I was surprised by this board and thought can I eat here if it does not have a WIFI connection. But this statement hit my mind and made me think this again and again and question myself, is it so hard to talk to people in front of us?

Social media has played a big role in communication and bringing world closer. But don’t you think that the same social media which was supposed to bring the world closer is creating boundaries for us and taking us away from our closed ones and is making us antisocial.

Like every coin has two sides heads and tails same way social media too have both sides. We already know its positive sides. In this difficult period of covid when the world was on pause, we could get update of every minute what’s happening outside by social media like Facebook Instagram WhatsApp. No doubt it helped us overcome the most difficult period. But let’s be honest with ourself and think, did we spend more time with our family or with Netflix and social media? Yes, that’s the harsh truth we are living with. People of our generation should realize the importance of happiness which we get from small things such as conversation with family members and making efforts for them just a simple outing or spending time with them makes us happy.

So, it’s high time that we understand the importance of socializing and use social media in a limit as we know that saying anything in excess is harmful.

Being a teen, we face difficulty to talk to people in front of us. But the same us is comfortable talking to virtual friends. We know back in days children would play outside with friends of their age this helped them socialize but we don’t see the same happen today; from childhood we get a device called mobile phones and laptops with many games which connect us to this amazing virtual world which seems to be difficult to escape. Whether it is a five-year-old child or a ninety-five-year-old granny everyone needs phone 24 -7 with them. Playing with neighbors is a big thing to ask as we hardly know the family staying next to us. This was good for our health also as it kept us healthy but now, we don’t play anymore. We are more into virtual games from our childhood which has affected our life style. Even when we compare ourself from our older generation we see they are far more active than us.

Yes, even I wonder it would be so good if we lived in Gokul Dham Society. Let’s make our society like a Gokul Dham Society. And talk to each other let’s not forget social media was made to bring world closer.

TIPS FOR BEING SOCIAL

• Start interacting with students in your class.
• Open up to people about your feelings.
• Adapt to surrounding.
• Set a limited time you spend with devices.
• Visit places with friends and family.
• Make new friends.

MANISHA JAISWAL

1 ST YEAR (B. TECH AI/ML)

SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY

SUSHANT UNIVERSITY

Get us on 1800-270-5520

Send us on: [email protected]

Sushant University (Erstwhile Sushant University) was established in 2012 under the Haryana Private Universities Act 2006. Located in the heart of Gurugram, India’s largest hub of National and Fortune 500 companies. We have eight schools offering programmes in Architecture, Design, Law, Management, Hospitality, Engineering, Health Sciences and Planning & Development.

• Education Loans
• Payment Procedure
• Fee Structure and Refund Policy
• Online Fee Depositing
• Become our Business Associate

EXAMINATION

Quick links.

• Platform Lecture Series
• Scholarships
• Cyber Bullying Policy
• Employee CRM
• Grievence Redressal Portal
• Office-Order-06-Sep-2019-Classroom-regulations.pdf

Copyright Sushant University (Erstwhile Ansal University) 2021. All Rights Reserved

• Skip to main content
• Skip to main navigation
• Awards & Honors
• News by topic
• News archives
• E-Newsletter
• Tuesday Newsday
• UCSC Magazine
• Administrative Messages

Home / 2024 / May / Researchers explain social media’s role in rapidly shifting social norms on gender and sexuality

Researchers explain social media’s role in rapidly shifting social norms on gender and sexuality

May 29, 2024

By Allison Arteaga Soergel

A new paper summarizing decades of research demonstrates how social media has supported an explosion of diversity in gender and sexuality in America during the 21st Century, and also how these technologies have equally enabled a cultural backlash. 

The paper’s authors, UC Santa Cruz Psychology Department faculty members Phil Hammack and Adriana Manago, identified five main narratives about gender and sexuality that they believe emerged through social media as people have strived to be “authentic” on these platforms. The findings, along with resulting recommendations for psychology researchers and practitioners, were published in American Psychologist , the flagship research journal of the American Psychological Association.

Since its inception, social media has essentially reversed the flow of information in American society, challenging traditional sources of authority and empowering individuals to create and share information for themselves, the paper says. The formats and customs of social media especially encourage self-expression and “authenticity,” or sharing your inner experience. Online connectivity also removes geographic barriers to finding other like-minded individuals. 

Together, these conditions set the stage perfectly for new cultural norms to emerge, the paper’s authors argue. Manago, an associate professor of psychology who studies how communication technology shapes human development, explained that the team’s theory runs directly counter to “social contagion theory.”

“We’ve seen so much change so quickly in things like pronouns and sexual orientation that people have been hungry for an explanation, and as a result, social contagion theory is this very harmful idea that has become popular, despite not being backed by good evidence,” she said. 

“Social contagion theory argues that adolescents are going online and seeing that expressing yourself as having an LGBTQ+ identity is cool and popular, so they are conforming to a popular notion outside of themselves,” Manago continued. “Our paper argues the opposite. The diversity that we’re seeing now was always there, but the dominant cultural paradigms previously masked it. Now, new communications tools are bringing it to light by promoting and enabling authenticity.”

New cultural narratives of gender and sexuality  

Among the new cultural narratives that researchers say have emerged from online authenticity is the concept of gender as self-constructed, meaning that there can be a difference between sex assigned at birth and a person’s gender identity or expression. For example, research shows that Tumblr blogs have helped transgender people navigate the gender affirmation process, and TikTok has become a central resource for youth who are questioning their own gender or sexuality to explore identities and connect with others.

Hammack, a psychology professor and expert on generational differences in gender and sexuality, emphasizes that people are using social media as a tool to better understand complexities around gender identity that they already feel within themselves. 

“We have to remember that, with social media, an algorithm responds to the person,” he said. “So if you’re starting to question your gender, you’re going to look for related content, and then the algorithm affirms that, but you are still the active agent who is on social media liking things. That agency sometimes gets downplayed when we talk about the influence of social media.”

Another narrative that has gained traction on social media is the idea that sexuality is plural, playful, flexible, and fluid. One aspect of this is the possibility for attraction to multiple genders. For example, research that used the Craigslist personals section to recruit participants has bolstered new understandings of bisexuality among men and has also shown that some people who identify as straight still seek same-sex contact. Meanwhile, Tumblr helped to popularize the pansexual identity. And new social networking websites for people with fetishes have increased acceptance of a wider variety of sexual practices.  

Some modern online narratives also present sexuality and monogamy as cultural compulsions, rather than biological ones. For example, asexuality has become an accepted identity for those who feel little or no sexual attraction, with help from a website that challenged traditional pathologizing views. And new dating apps have been developed specifically to support forms of consensual nonmonogamy that are gaining public visibility. 

Intersectionality has become a key part of many online narratives too, such as the #SayHerName campaign on Twitter, which sought to draw attention to state-sanctioned violence against Black cisgender and transgender women alike. New terminologies and forms of identity have also developed on Tumblr that increasingly recognize how gender and sexuality intersect with each other, and these concepts have spilled over onto platforms like Twitter, now called X, and TikTok.

But not all online narratives that seek to convey authenticity in gender and sexuality promote diversity. A transphobic, homophobic, and misogynistic backlash has also spread through social media technology, sometimes resulting in real-world violence. One example is how Reddit and TikTok have spread “incel” or “involuntary celibate” ideology that views both women’s equality and sexual and gender diversity as threats to masculinity.  

“These reactionary forces that are being destabilized from their dominant position in society are also using authenticity narratives about being a ‘real man’ to spread their views, and they’re claiming that all of these other narratives are false,” Manago explained. “So authenticity is a central concept in all of the narratives on gender and sexuality that we see emerge through these platforms, regardless of whether they’re progressive or regressive.”

Recommendations for psychologists

Based on their findings, the paper’s authors offer several recommendations. Psychology researchers and practitioners should start by grounding their work in people’s lived experiences, the paper says. That could include counselors making sure they stay up to date on new popular terminology around gender and sexuality and researchers asking more open-ended questions and offering write-in options for collecting information about gender and sexuality.  

The team also recommends approaching emerging forms of identity with affirmation, rather than suspicion and focusing on the phenomena of sexual and gender diversity more so than individual identity labels, which inevitably always leave someone out. The paper advises that social change on these issues is fluid and nonlinear, and the current context is not necessarily one of “achievement” for rights and recognition, as evidenced by regressive authenticity narratives that have spread alongside progressive ones. 

Hammack and Manago ultimately encourage psychologists to continue challenging normative thinking, both around sexuality and gender and around social media’s role in identity formation. They say social media is neither a source of youth corruption nor a cure-all for advancing acceptance and equity. Instead, meaningful cultural change that starts on social media should result in new resources and support in our geographic communities. 

“If community spaces and educational spaces don’t keep pace with these changes, that can become dangerous, because young people will continue to turn to social media, and they may lose confidence in other sources of authority, like teachers and parents, who they see as being socially behind the times,” Hammack said. “As adults, the responsible thing is for us to acknowledge that we live in a time of great change on gender and sexuality and to find ways to integrate new perspectives into education, our communities, and our families, so that young people don’t experience isolation and don’t lose confidence in us.” 

University News

• University News Home
• Monthly Newsletter

Other News & Events

• Campus Calendars

• UCSC Chancellor
• Press Releases
• Contacts for Reporters
• Send us an email
• Report an accessibility barrier
• Land Acknowledgment
• Accreditation

Last modified: May 29, 2024 128.114.113.82

Is Social Media Making Us Antisocial?

Show More Is Social Media Making Us Antisocial? With the help of technology we are able to share things with people around the world in the blink of an eye. You can choose to tweet 140 characters at a time, write a post that appears on friends’ news feed or share a photo with a filter thrown on top. Social networking has become an unquestionable part of our everyday lives. We never stop to think anything of it because we spend a good amount of time each day on sites like Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram and Facebook . But do we stop to think what we could be doing if we were not on social media or how it affects how we interact with each other ‘in real life’. Communication skills are known as an art to master. The only way to become good at communicating …show more content… Today, it seems everyone including young kids have some sort of social network account like Facebook, Twitter or YouTube. In fact, I’m sure that many users on YouTube who claim to be 50+ are really just 11 year olds trying to pass the age restriction. Heavy exposure to online media has been shown to limit a child’s attention span and academic performance. Not to mention they are more likely to click those ads promising $1,000,000 if you click now. However, a majority of parents do not disapprove of their children using a social network, even if the site has an age limit. As our lives become more evolved around technology, it is hard to shut it out even for a day. The younger generation gradually replace real life experience with the comfortable chair in front of the computer. More and more teenagers would rather spend a few hours online, rather than going out and experiencing the real world. A study by ‘Knowthenet’ found that more than half of children had used a social media site before the age of 10 with Facebook being the most popular. To have a Facebook account, you must be the age of 13 but fabricating your date of birth is easy to do with or without their parents knowing about it. As they start to spend time online rather than off, they start to live in a different …show more content… With the help of technology, we can contact anyone around the world, at any time, with just a few keystrokes. It is free, unlike calling across the ocean, and live. We can also share elements of our life, from what we enjoy to photos of ourselves and those in our lives. It is like being a part of that person’s world, even though distance keeps you apart. Other social benefits that help society are it can be a valuable aid for crime-solving and a forum for support and safety information during a crisis. Government agencies now heavily use social media to investigate crime related issues as well as spread information on things like natural disasters. Many people choose to check social media rather than an online news site on the latest information about what is happening in their

Related Documents

Fahrenheit 451: technology's strong hold on our youth.

The emotional status and reputation of children is challenged daily by the use of social media through posts and even personal conversation (Coyl 405). As a result of the harm that ties into social media’s use, children can undergo the ramifications of depression and anxiety at an age too young for complete understanding. From the moment we enter the world we wholly place our trust in our parents, but as we grow to believe in our own independence this open relationship diminishes. Sloviter argues that since social media websites are easily accessible despite their terms and conditions concerning age, parents are pushed…

Has Texting Killed Romance Analysis

Ghuman says, “… (digitalization) provides us opportunity to stay instantly in touch with others locally, nationally, and internationally. ”(110) Meanwhile, as a college student, leaving high school and getting away from boyfriend is a stressful experience. Thanks to the new world of electronic intimacy, Facebook, email, Skype, Tweeter and other social medias have brought us a convenient way to communicate with friends across the country. We can share our experiences by the pictures and moments that we post online, even though we are…

Isabel Evans

Social media has come a long way since it was first introduced to the world of technology. Where would society stand without social media today? In Isabel H. Evans’ article “Head in the (Instagrammed) Clouds”, she states a common international problem: the overuse of social media. Evans indicates that online sites are a distraction and are taking over daily routine. She argues that although she uses Twitter and Facebook herself, sites like those are a waste of time.…

The Documented Life: The Negative Impact Of Social Media

Social media has a huge impact on the social interactions of today’s population. I take a lot of time throughout my day to check Facebook; I check it whenever there’s a lull in conversation or whenever I go to the bathroom; or even during a conversation with my fiance (which she gets quite upset about). Writer Sherry Turkle articulates in her article “The Documented Life” that today's lifestyle is digitized, meaning that “People didn’t seem to feel like themselves unless they shared a thought or feeling” in relation to social media. There are many people with smartphones, connected all the time; giving us the ability to post our hourly status updates and our daily made-up selfies to our social media website of choice. With the ability to upload posts and pictures explaining the things that we do throughout our day, our lives revolve around social media at any given moment.…

Many Younger Facebook Users 'Unfriend' The Network By Patti Neighmond

Social networking allows users to connect with others down the street, across town, or even around the world, with just a few clicks. There are many advancements made in today’s world, but as the articles “Many Younger Facebook Users ‘Unfriend’ the Network” and “Anti-Social Networks? We’re Just as Cliquey Online.” point out, social media can have negative aspects as well, such as unrealistic lifestyles, uniformity, and the interaction with others. In the article “Many Younger Facebook Users ‘Unfriend’ the Network” the author Patti Neighmond explains how some Facebook users are turning away from the popular social networking site due to feeling “left out” online.…

The Way We Live Now: Social Media

Social media has been around since 1997, however, it became popular around 2003 to 2005. Nowadays, social media has been incorporated into the millennial generation and their lives mainly revolve around it. In Peggy Orenstein’s “The Way We Live Now: I Tweet, Therefore I Am,” she asserts social media has overtaken people’s lives through personal and social reality. Orenstein believes social media wastes people’s time, causes people be unable to identify between their personal and private lives, and ruins relationships. Orenstein starts off her article about a morning with her daughter and finds herself thinking about sharing the moment on Twitter.…

How Does Social Networking Affect Our Society

I believe that social networking has changed the way people interact in our society. So much caution has to be used when posting on the internet and not all people understand that. Those are the main issues in this section. There are examples of these problems explained in more than three essays in the chapter. Things like mood, job opportunities, positions on a team, and even acceptance into schools are altered because of carelessness on the internet.…

Difference Between Technology And Happiness

Although sometimes, the communication may lead them to the wrong way. As long as people have their belief, the communication still can be the surrogate to the happiness. Technology also is a good way that offer people to have a effective communication. Restak thinks that “ (w)ith the cell phone, that process has become even more intimate. Time, distance, night, and day-the rules of the natural and physical world-cease to be limiting factors”(419).Technology can build the close relationship with others because it has no limit factors for people to communicate.…

Project X Sociology

JR, a French artist, once spoken, “The more social media, we have, the more we think we are connected, yet we are disconnected from each other.” Since the creation of the internet, people can access increasing information as the years go on. Whether people realize it or not, social media affects our everyday lives, such as religion and work. Just on Facebook alone, half of million people, or 6 people per second, becomes brand new users every day.…

Social Media Persuasive Essay

Social media has taken full control of the way we go about living our lives. The power that it withholds over us determines who our “friends” are, plans what we are doing for every moment of our day and also has consumed us with false visions of the way we perceive our world. In Malcolm Gladwell’s article, “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted”, Gladwell discusses the negative side of pairing activism and social media together. Social media places activists in a negative light by their ability to hide behind a screen. Thus, this negative light that social media brings, also brings upon a negative light when counterfactually thinking.…

The Influence Of Technology: What's So Great About Technology

What’s So Great about Technology? The influence of technology is often misjudged in the world. Although technology can be seen as a curse to society, it can also be used as an advantage.…

Social Media Biased Report

The reliability of technology and the information obtained on the internet has come under scrutiny for providing misinformation on a variety of different levels. Biased articles, social media, and misleading information has become the norm over the years and has many left questioning all of the effects it has on students and young adults on a day-to-day basis. According to Pew Research, nearly seventy-five percent of adults since 2014 have been using social networking. Social networking sites may actually spread information faster than news outlets or any other type of social media.…

Persuasive Speech: Attention Getter For The Social Media

PART ONE: Specific Purpose Statement to inform the audience about social media PART TWO: Speech Sections Introduction Attention getter: Did you know 92% of teens go online daily and 24% go on constantly? Preview speech body: Everyday we are constantly using our phones and computers whether it be Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, etc. Social networking sites play a constant role throughout today’s society whether it be negative or positive. Site like Facebook connect old friends or site Twitter and Instagram have become platforms to make people famous. But it has also become a sanction to hold people against their own personal information.…

What Is The Impact Of Social Media On American Society

Telephone lines and radio signals enabled people to communicate across great distances instantaneously, something that mankind had never experienced before” (Drew). Instead of using radio and telephone lines, what is more commonly used now is the smartphone. The smartphone has it all. A smart phone can allow you to: communicate, take photos, watch videos, and of course allow you access social media. A social media site allows you to create some type of profile to describe who…

Children Should Not Be On Social Media Essay

Adults need to really take into consideration should they let their children be on social media at such a young age? There is a huge debate going on involving if children should or should not be on social media. There are many cons to children being on social media. Why is it so bad for children to be on social media? First, they can be exposed to dangerous or harmful content.…

Related Topics

• Social media
• Social network service
• Communication

Ready To Get Started?

• Create Flashcards
• Mobile apps
•   Facebook
•   Twitter
• Cookie Settings

Your child’s brain is developing rapidly, making them more susceptible to the harms of social media. And though they might put on a brave face, they could be hurting underneath. It’s time to unmask the harms of social media.

Up to 95% of youth ages 13–17 report using a social media platform opens in a new tab , with more than a third saying they use social media “almost constantly.”

There is growing concern for children and teens using social media. Social media can be incredibly harmful for youth. Kids need less screen time for healthy growth and development. We can work together to establish social media boundaries, model healthy social media use, and teach children how to use it safely.

The harms of social media

Teens who spent more than 3 hours per day on social media faced double the risk of experiencing poor mental health outcomes.

Nearly half of teens ages 13 to 17 said using social media makes them feel worse .

Almost 60% of teenage girls say they’ve been contacted by a stranger on social media platforms in ways that make them feel uncomfortable.

According to a survey of 8th and 10th graders, the average time spent on social media is 3.5 hours per day and almost 15% (1 in 7) spends 7+ hours per day on social media .

More than 60% of teens are regularly exposed to hate-based content .

Excessive social media use has been linked to sleep problems, attention problems, and feelings of exclusion among teenagers.

In a review of 36 studies, a consistent relationship was found between cyberbullying on social media and depression among children of all ages.

In a national survey of girls ages 11 to 15, one-third or more say they feel “addicted” to a social media platform .

More than half of teens report that it would be hard to give up social media .

Share this message with others

What do Utah parents think about social media?

It can be scary and intimidating raising kids in a world filled with technology—predators, inappropriate content, bullying, and a distorted reality are just some of the concerns you might have. But you’re not alone! We asked Utah parents what they thought about social media, its effects on their children, and what they’re doing to help protect their kids.

• 88% believe social media has a detrimental impact on children and youth.
• 63% were concerned about social media impacting their child’s mental health.
• 60% were concerned about social media impacting their child’s body image.
• 94% enforce boundaries with their children’s social media usage, like enforcing time limits, content restrictions, and setting age limits.
• 84% encourage their children to unplug from social media and participate in other activities.

What can you do to protect your child?

Reconsider allowing your child to have social media and encourage them to wait to use it until they are an adult.

Governor Spencer J. Cox

• Create a family media plan. Agreed-upon expectations can help establish healthy technology boundaries at home – including social media use. A family media plan opens in a new tab can promote open family discussion and rules about media use and include topics such as balancing screen/online time, content boundaries, and not disclosing personal information.
• Create tech-free zones and encourage children to foster in-person relationships. Electronics can be a distraction after bedtime and can interfere with sleep. Consider restricting the use of phones, tablets, and computers for at least 1 hour before bedtime and through the night. Keep family mealtimes and in-person gatherings device-free to build social bonds and engage in a two-way conversation. Help your child develop social skills and nurture his or her in-person relationships by encouraging unstructured and offline connections with others and making unplugged interactions a daily priority. Learn more from the American Academy of Pediatrics opens in a new tab .
• Model responsible social media behavior. Children often learn behaviors and habits from what they see around them. Parents can set a good example of what responsible and healthy social media use looks like by limiting their own use and being mindful of social media habits.
• Teach kids about technology and empower them to be responsible online participants at the appropriate age. Discuss with children the risks of social media as well as the importance of respecting privacy and protecting personal information in age-appropriate ways. Have conversations with children about who they are connecting with, their privacy settings, their online experiences, and how they are spending their time online. Encourage them to seek help should they need it. Learn more from the American Academy of Pediatrics Center of Excellence on Social Media and Youth Mental Health opens in a new tab and American Psychological Association Health Advisory on Social Media Use in Adolescence opens in a new tab .
• Report cyberbullying and online abuse and exploitation. Talk to your child about cyberbullying and what to do if they are being harassed through email, text message, online games, or social media. Make sure they understand the dangers of being contacted by an adult online, especially if they are being asked to share private images or perform intimate or sexual acts.
• Work with other parents to help establish shared norms and practices and to support programs and policies around healthy social media use. Despite what your kids may say, you’re not the only parent who won’t let their children have social media or who sets family rules about phones and technology.

In 2023, the Utah State Legislature passed Senate Bill 152 opens in a new tab   and opens in a new tab House Bill 311 , enacting the Utah Social Media Regulation Acts. Learn more about the laws here opens in a new tab .

Research & resources

• Gabb:  What is Sextortion? Everything You Need to Know  
• Gabb Study: When Teens Take a Break from Social Media opens in a new tab
• The Common Sense Census:  Media Use by Tweens and Teens, 2021 opens in a new tab
• U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory: opens in a new tab Social Media and Youth Mental Health
• The Atlantic:  All Work and No Play: Why Your Kids Are More Anxious, Depressed
• American Academy of Pediatrics: National Center of Excellence on Social Media and Youth Mental Health opens in a new tab
• American Academy of Pediatrics: Media and Young Minds opens in a new tab
• American Psychological Association: Health advisory on social media use in adolescence opens in a new tab
• University of Utah Health: The impact of social media on teens’ mental health opens in a new tab and Tips for healthy social media use: Parents and teens opens in a new tab
• PBS Utah: Social media and youth mental health opens in a new tab
• Teen Mental Health Is Plummeting, and Social Media is a Major Contributing Cause opens in a new tab
• Social media and mental health opens in a new tab
• U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory: Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation opens in a new tab
• Haidt, J., & Twenge, J. (ongoing). Adolescent mood disorders since 2010: A collaborative review. opens in a new tab Unpublished manuscript, New York University.

View all educational and campaign materials

If you or someone you know is considering suicide

Tell us about your experience with harms to minors from engaging with social media platforms.

Presenting social harms: a parent presentation

How does social media affect sleep?

• My View My View
• Following Following
• Saved Saved

Reactions to Donald Trump being found guilty in historic New York trial

• Medium Text

REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE TRUMP

Campaign of president joe biden and vice president kamala harris, ian sams, spokesperson for the white house counsel's office, house judiciary committee chairman jim jordan, republican of ohio, us representative jerry nadler, democrat and ranking member of the house judiciary committee, us representative eric swalwell, democrat of california, house republican conference chair elise stefanik of new york, potential vice presidential candidate, house majority leader steve scalise, republican of louisiana, us representative lauren boebert, republican of colorado, democratic senator chris murphy of connecticut, us senator rand paul, republican of kentucky, former trump national security adviser john bolton, now a trump critic, us representative matt gaetz, republican of florida, us representative marjorie taylor greene, republican of georgia, us senator rick scott, republican of florida and candidate to replace senator mitch mcconnell as minority leader, us senator lindsey graham, republican of south carolina, us representative ronny jackson, republican of texas and white house physician under trump, former maryland governor larry hogan, now running for the us senate, right-wing activist tim pool.

Sign up here.

Compiled by Jonathan Oatis; Editing by Daniel Wallis

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. New Tab , opens new tab

World Chevron

Trump supporters turn US flags upside down to protest guilty verdict

Upside-down American flags emerged outside homes and on social media on Friday in support of Donald Trump after a New York jury returned a historic guilty verdict against the former Republican president.